With a recent court ruling in his favour, proprietor of Precious Metal Mines, Tamesh Jagmohan says his company is currently working on a development plan for the former Sunset Lakes property.
Speaking with this newspaper on Friday, Jagmohan, who purchased the 100-acre property situated at Providence, East Bank Demerara from Citizens Bank Inc, said luxury housing will be the focus. However, he said that a determination is yet to be made concerning the level of luxury the development will offer.
“We want it to be the best we can deliver or ever existed in Guyana, that is why we don’t want jump into it and do any mediocre development.”
The property development will be a combination of single homes, duplexes and town houses. Twenty-five percent of the property will also be set aside to be sold as one-acre plots, giving potential buyers the opportunity to develop and customize the land to include amenities suitable for their lifestyles.
Should all go well, works on the development should kick off in the first quarter of 2023.
When the development was first announced in 2014, Chinese logging company Baishanlin had proposed that some 400 luxury homes be built in a gated “New Life Community.”
That investment that saw the participation of businessman BK Tiwarie however fell apart and the land was then sold to Jagmohan by Citizens Bank.
At present the development is overrun with thick vegetation, along with abandoned buildings and machinery. There are about seven unoccupied structures in the compound and the centrepiece, a large semi-circular building, remains incomplete.
Stabroek News visited the location on Friday and it appeared the same as on previous visits over the course of the past year.
The semi-circular building remains abandoned with much infrastructural works to be completed. Only a section of the roof is covered while the frame of the remaining section is exposed. Machinery, trucks, and containers, along with hardware material were parked all along the main entrance.
When the project was announced in 2014, Zoey Song, who was the sales manager at the time for the property, had said that the homes would be built European-style with all construction material imported from the USA and China. “The uniqueness definitely sets us apart and everything is one of a kind with the highest possible standards.”
Under the previous PPP/C administration, Tiwarie had signed an agreement via his Sunset Lakes Inc company with the Central Housing and Planning Authority (CH&PA) to purchase and develop the 100 acres of land at a cost pegged at $475 million. He paid a quarter of the sum and had six months to pay off the balance which he did not do.
In 2014, Tiwarie entered into a partnership with Baishanlin where the company would pay him US$8 million and develop the site. As part of the agreement, he would also get to keep some of the house lots in the gated community for his personal use.
Tiwarie later took Baishanlin to court for the balance of US$4 million on the agreed purchase price. He has maintained that the lands were never sold wholly to Chu Hongbo (Baishanlin’s managing director at the time) as he remained a part of the partnership and since Hongbo defaulted, he should have either gotten monies due to him or the equivalent in lands.
In a separate court case, where Tiwarie challenged the passage of the title to Jagmohan’s company, High Court Judge Franklyn Holder last month ruled that the property vested in Sunset Lakes could not be said to be owned by Tiwarie (the Claimant).
Holder referenced the legal principle of a company having a separate legal personality from its creditors or shareholders, in the passage of his judgment.
On this point the Judge noted, “At no point in time was the Claimant ever the registered proprietor of the property,” at the centre of the litigation.
Proceedings had been initiated by Citizens Bank to recover the more than $320 million from Baishanlin and its affiliate company Puruni Woods Products Inc. which it had loaned for the purchase of the 1,000 acres of land. Citizens then succeeded in taking possession of the land and later sold it to Jagmohan.
